


From What I've Tasted of Desire

by sunflowerseedsandscience



Series: Early On [5]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s01e08 Ice, Episode: s01e12 Fire, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 13:14:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8209852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerseedsandscience/pseuds/sunflowerseedsandscience
Summary: She wants desperately to believe that it could never happen, that it would take far more than a prehistoric worm burrowing into his brain stem for Mulder to ever lift a hand against her... but the image is there now, in her mind, and she can't get rid of it.  Mulder, his face contorted with rage, eyes blank and devoid of the affection she almost always sees when he looks at her, standing over her with his hands wrapped around her throat.  
She shakes her head, hard.  Not going to happen.  Not worth thinking about.  Mulder is fine, she's fine, and as soon as this storm is over, they'll get out of here.





	

Dana Scully does not like possessive, territorial men.

Nothing has spelled the death of her past relationships quicker than being told who she can go out with, where she can go, when she needs to be home, or anything else that should be hers to decide as an independent adult. The moment that any man she's seeing even insinuates that he should have some say in her relationships with other people, it's over. Either he trusts her or he doesn't, and if he does, there's no reason she shouldn't go anywhere, at any time, with any company she pleases.

Ethan is well aware of this. And Scully knows he's aware of it. She assumes it's why, when she finally gets home from her Smithsonian-and-Chinese-food jaunt with Mulder, Ethan is all apologies over not being more understanding about the demands of her job. Again. While she's initially skeptical, this time, he seems to mean it, because for the next couple of weeks, he's nothing but supportive and accommodating, not complaining at all when she has to go out of town twice, not even when it means rescheduling a dinner party at their apartment with his colleagues. So when she comes home and informs Ethan that she and Mulder are flying to Alaska in the morning, and that she'll be gone at least a week, she's not expecting an argument. And she doesn't get one.

But then he drives her to the airport.

It's an innocuous enough gesture, initially, though doing it means he'll be late for work. Scully puts it down to this trip being longer than any of the others she's been on before, and decides it's sweet, really, that Ethan is clearly going to miss her. She doesn't begin to think otherwise until he bypasses the passenger drop-off lane and parks in short-term parking, instead. She frowns at him as he pops the trunk.

"What are you doing?" she asks, as he climbs out and pulls her suitcase out of the car.

"Can't I walk you to your gate?" he asks.

"You really don't need to," she says. "Mulder's meeting me at the ticketing counter. Don't you have to get to work?"

"I already let them know I'd be a little late," Ethan says, extending the handle on her bag and ignoring her outstretched arm as she reaches to take it from him. "I got this. Let me walk you in, okay?" Scully purses her lips, but finally, she nods. Ethan keeps his hand on her back, in the same spot Mulder touches when she precedes him through a door or into a room... but Ethan's touch feels quite different from Mulder's. Her partner's touch is always polite, but confident. 

Ethan's feels more like he's asserting ownership.

The feeling intensifies when they reach the ticketing counter and find Mulder, and instead of letting go, Ethan's hand slides around her waist, tightening considerably. It takes everything Scully has not to throw it off. The last thing she wants right now is to make a scene. She's furious, though, as they walk to the gate, Ethan's arm still firmly encircling her, because she knows exactly what he's doing. Driving her to the airport, walking her in, putting his arm around her- all of this might seem like the sweet gestures of a man who knows he'll miss his girlfriend while she's away, but that's not what this is.

This is Ethan staking his claim.

At the gate, Mulder shakes Ethan's hand, and with a quick, "See you on the plane, Scully," (and a wry smile that says that, profiler that he is, he sees right through Ethan) he's off down the jetway. Scully turns to Ethan, stepping out of his embrace.

"Okay, he's gone," she says. "Primitive display of territoriality over." 

"I have no idea what you're talking about," says Ethan, but his guilty face says otherwise. Scully rolls her eyes.

"Ethan, I don't want to fight right now," she says. "You either trust me or you don't. Mulder's not going to hit me over the head and drag me back to his cave, so please stop acting like you have to warn him away from me." She stretches up and gives him a quick kiss on the cheek, sidestepping his attempts to pull her in for more. She's not publicly demonstrative, she never has been, and it's driving her up the wall that he's suddenly trying to get her to be, just to make himself feel better. "I'll see you in a week or so," she says, and before he can respond, she's pulling her carry-on down the jetway, trying not to feel guilty that she's so relieved to be free of him for a few days.

 

\---------

 

"Don't forget: the spots on the dog went away."

With those unsettling words, Mulder closes his door, leaving Scully alone in the dark hallway, shivering as she looks after him. Does Mulder take lessons in saying the wrong thing, in figuring out exactly what will make everyone around him nervous? She lets herself into her own room, shutting the door behind her. She throws her things down on the bed and turns on the light, gazing around at the closet-sized bedroom. Pinned to the wall is a photograph of the research team- all of them dead now- and her eyes are drawn inescapably to it. She studies the happy, oblivious faces of the scientists who died here, and she wonders: what must it have been like, to be murdered by people you know, people you care about?

People you thought that you could trust?

She's got the chest of drawers shoved halfway in front of the door before she's even fully aware of what she's doing. Once it's in place, she curls in a ball on the floor beside it, trying to slow her breathing and mentally berating herself for being so paranoid. She wants desperately to believe that it could never happen, that it would take far more than a prehistoric worm burrowing into his brain stem for Mulder to ever lift a hand against her... but the image is there now, in her mind, and she can't get rid of it. Mulder, his face contorted with rage, eyes blank and devoid of the affection she almost always sees when he looks at her, standing over her with his hands wrapped around her throat. 

She shakes her head, hard. Not going to happen. Not worth thinking about. Mulder is fine, she's fine, and as soon as this storm is over, they'll get out of here.

There's a sound in the hallway outside, and Scully sits up straight against the wall, every muscle in her body tensed. She hears footsteps in the corridor, coming closer, stopping on the other side of her door... and then there's a soft knock. For a moment, she can't move, but then the knock comes again.

"Scully, it's me." She stands slowly, looking at the locked door apprehensively. "Can I come in? Please?" She suddenly realizes that, to let him in, she'll need to move the chest of drawers, which he'll almost certainly hear her doing, and the thought of his expression is almost enough by itself to make her say no. "Come on, Scully, it's just me. Open the door." She heaves a sigh.

"Hang on, Mulder." Scully throws her weight against the dresser, shoving it back just enough to leave room to admit him. She unlocks the door, opens it, and steps back. Mulder squeezes in through the narrow space she's left him, closing the door behind himself. He looks at the dresser with raised eyebrows, and she braces herself for his ridicule... but when he looks back to her, he's smiling, and his face is gentle.

"I'd make fun of you," he says, "except that until a couple of minutes ago, I was sitting in my own room with my hand practically welded to my gun." She smiles, feeling instantly more relaxed. "You okay, Scully?"

"Yeah," she says. "I'm fine. It's just, uh... unsettling, you know? This whole thing." He nods.

"With any luck, the storm'll blow itself out quickly enough," he says, sinking down to sit on the bed. She remains standing, leaning against the closed door.

"So what's up, Mulder?" she asks. "Any specific reason you're keeping me from going to bed?" He waggles his eyebrows suggestively.

"Who says I'm stopping you, Scully?" he asks. She continues to look at him expectantly, tamping down the spark of warmth in her belly at his words, hoping it doesn't show on her face how tempted she is to crawl into that tiny bunk with him, even if it's only to obtain some peace and comfort.

"Mulder." He sighs, relenting.

"I was just wondering," he says. "About this morning, at the airport." She frowns. "What was that all about?"

"What was _what_ all about?"

"Oh, come on, Scully," Mulder says, rolling his eyes. "We've been on lots of cases out of town before. Ethan's never driven you to the airport for any of them. And I think he touched you more on that walk to the terminal than I've ever seen him touch you- and that includes a night where a murderer had broken into your apartment and gone after you. So what gives?" Scully crosses her arms tightly in front of her. She doesn't want to get into this now, when they're locked in together with three un-trusting strangers, a killer parasite, and no idea about when they'll get out. "Did you tell him about what happened?"

"What are you talking about?"

"On our first case, Scully. In Oregon. In the graveyard... and in the motel room." She looks away. No, this is _not_ a conversation they should be having right now. "Did you tell Ethan about that? Is that the reason for his sudden need to stick a 'Private Property' sign on you?"

"No, Mulder, I didn't," she says. 

"Why not?"

"He doesn't need to know, Mulder. Nothing happened." 

"I wouldn't call that _nothing._ "

"We kissed, yes, but we stopped it before it got serious. I didn't think Ethan needed to know, because it didn't mean anything and-" Mulder looks like she's slapped him, and she stops.

"It didn't mean anything, huh?"

"That... that was a bad choice of words. I mean it didn't mean anything as far as _he_ was concerned. It's not like I'm leaving him for you."

"Yeah, you've made _that_ abundantly clear," says Mulder, his voice brittle. Scully opens her mouth to respond, but Mulder holds up his hand, stopping her. "Forget it, Scully. We should both be trying to get some sleep." He slides off the bed. "See you in the morning, okay?" Without waiting for her to respond, without another glance in her direction, he leaves.

 

\--------------

 

It takes three connecting flights to get them back to DC, and the last of Scully's Benadryl wears off sometime during the second leg of the trip. Mulder offers to find some in the airport as they're landing, but there's some confusion about their gate being ready, and by the time they're allowed off of the plane, they have to run to make it to their final flight. 

"I could buy you a scotch or two from the drink cart," Mulder suggests, but Scully glares at him.

"We're on the clock, Mulder," she says. And so he does the same thing he did on their first flight home together, back when they were leaving Oregon: he reaches over and takes her hand in his. She resists at first, but as the plane hurtles down the runway for takeoff, she gives up and squeezes his fingers until he can barely feel them. She tries to let go once the plane is fully airborne, but he hangs on.

"You never know when we might hit turbulence," he says, and she looks as though she's going to argue... but then she smiles, softly, and laces her fingers with his.

"True," she says. "Can't hurt to be prepared." He grins back at her. She leans her head back and closes her eyes, but Mulder continues to watch her. If he looks closely, he can discern the place, under her chin, where her makeup ends and her smooth, porcelain skin begins. He gazes at the soft expanse of smoothness at the juncture of neck and shoulder, and his mind drifts, thinking back to Alaska, to his hands on her in the dimly-lit storage room, brushing her coppery hair aside to reveal her exquisite neck, made somehow more attractive to him by its smattering of freckles. 

Had he truly believed that she might be infected, that he needed to check and make sure? No, not really. 

Had he been looking for an excuse to touch her? Absolutely.

Which is, if he's honest, exactly what he's doing right now. But he doesn't think she minds; he knows Scully well enough by now to know that if she didn't want him holding her hand, she'd have no qualms about telling him. It makes him feel somewhat sad, having to find a reason to hold her hand beyond simply wanting to.

But then her head drops onto his shoulder, and in the darkest recesses of his mind, he begins toying with the idea of hiding her Benadryl before all their flights in the future.

 

\-------------

 

It's not finding Mulder and Phoebe Green kissing that shocks Scully. If she's being honest with herself, she'd assumed, when Mulder headed up to Boston, that much more than that would likely be happening behind closed doors.

What surprises Scully is her _reaction_ to seeing it happening, not ten feet away from her.

She knows, on a purely rational level, that she has no right to feel this way. But that doesn't stop the sickening drop her stomach suddenly takes, the buzz that fills her ears, the way her heart clenches as though it's being squeezed by a particularly jagged pair of pliers. She's already mentally chastising herself for her weakness within seconds, reminding herself that Mulder doesn't answer to her, that he's allowed to kiss anyone he wants. Doing it while on the job might be more than a little unprofessional... but, then, hadn't they done the same in Oregon?

She's almost grateful, when she looks away and spots the blinking red lights on the fire alarm, to have an excuse to interrupt them, a reason to come between them besides her own unjustified jealousy.

 

\----------------

 

Scully takes him to lunch at their favorite deli, around the corner from the Hoover building, and to her credit, she doesn't look the slightest bit uncomfortable or upset. She'd even managed to joke with him, making him jump out of his skin in their office with her cute little English accent. But it doesn't stop Mulder from feeling guilty, whether it makes sense or not. Guilt comes naturally to him; he needs very little provocation to wallow in it, and making his partner uncomfortable, even for a moment, is enough to set him off.

"Scully," he says in a low voice, as soon as there's a lull in the conversation, "I want to apologize." She frowns.

"For what?" He gives her a look.

"You know for what. I know you saw-"

"Mulder-"

"When you came to tell us about the fire. What you interrupted. It didn't mean anything, Scully."

"You don't owe me any explanations," sighs Scully, sitting back in her booth and looking out the window, clearly uncomfortable. He gives it five minutes or less before she forcibly changes the subject, and he plows ahead.

"I didn't sleep with her," he blurts out, and Scully looks back at him, her eyebrows somewhere along her hairline. "In case you were wondering. I didn't sleep with her. What you saw- that kiss- that's all there was."

"Mulder, I don't need to know this. It's not my business who you sleep with or don't sleep with."

"I know," he says. "But... I'd really like for it to be your business."

" _Mulder._ "

"I think I've made my feelings pretty clear, Scully," he says. "This shouldn't come as any kind of a shock."

"You have, Mulder, but even if circumstances were different... even if I wasn't with someone... have you thought this through? What about our jobs? What about the X-Files? If we... if we did, and Blevins found out... they might split us up, Mulder. Would you be willing to risk that?" 

Mulder opens his mouth to tell her yes, he really is... but he stops. It's true that his solve rate has skyrocketed lately, and he's absolutely aware that Scully's presence is responsible for that. Her rationality, her insistence on finding scientific explanations for even his most bizarre theories, her steadfast support, all have combined to make his office, once the butt of all the other departments' jokes, into a veritable case-solving machine.

Of course, the office is still the butt of everyone else's jokes, but at least he's not weathering them on his own now.

Across from him, Scully is looking smug. "That's what I thought," she said. "When we first met, when you first told me about your search, about your quest, do you remember what you said?" He's silent. He remembers, of course he remembers, but God, he wishes he'd never said it, because it's sure as hell not true anymore. "You said that nothing else matters to you." 

"I know what I said, but Scully-"

"Something that important to you, Mulder... why are you in such a hurry to jeopardize it?"

"Because, Scully," he says, his voice low and earnest, "I have a feeling this could end up being even more important." Her head snaps up, and she locks eyes with him. Her face flushes and her lips part, ever so slightly... and the electricity crackling between then takes his breath away. He's almost certain that if they were alone, and not in a cafe full of people, no amount of risk would be enough for them to keep their hands off of each other.

But they're not alone, and they _are_ surrounded by people, and Scully seems to realize that, because she closes her mouth, looks away, and sits up straighter.

"There's no point talking about it now, anyway, Mulder," she says. "Not with circumstances being what they are."

"Scully-" She holds up a hand, stopping him.

"We need to get back to the office," she says firmly. He can practically see into her mind, see her filing this conversation away into a box. A strong metal box. One with a label: "Moments with Mulder that are never to be mentioned again."

Mulder lets it go for now, because he knows that, sooner or later, the hinges on that box are going to break. And when they do, all the risks and reasons in the world won't be enough to hold back what's coming.


End file.
